Zine-Making as Feminist Pedagogy

One of the challenges that many gender studies instructors face is making complex topics—such as gender identities, political theory, and media criticism—current, interesting, and relevant to students’ lives. When I began teaching Introduction to Women’s Studies, one student said, “But the women’s movement is over. What is left for us to talk about?” Her classmates nodded in agreement and looked at me blankly. Many students came to the class believing that women’s studies was solely a history lesson, that the discipline had little to offer their own lives. To complicate matters further, Introduction to Women’s Studies students come from various levels of experience—from students in their first to fourth years—and major in subjects ranging from engineering to psychology.1 In order to help students connect feminist theory to their own experiences, I suggest incorporating zines into gender studies courses as both reading and writing assignments. Zines are “non-commercial, non-professional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves” (Duncombe 6). They are available in many public and university libraries and independent bookstores, as well as from online zine distributors and other websites specializing in handmade goods (see Appendix for a teaching resource list). Zines occupy a middle ground between traditional research papers or essays and Web-based media such as blogs. Unlike research papers, zine style is decidedly informal. Images are hand-drawn or cutand-pasted by hand. Essays, poems, or confessional stories might also be handwritten—or typed with drawings framing the paragraphs. The informal, creative, and participatory character of zines shares some ground with blogs, but unlike blogs, zines are physical objects that can be held and passed from person to person by hand. Students find the middle-space of zines appealing. They like writing creatively for an audience beyond the classroom, but feel that their voices would be lost in the vastness of the Internet. The visual, material qualities of zines “ignite [a] creative urge” in students when they first touch, read, and share print zines (Piepmeier, “Why” 213).